


Wood & Nails

by Sab



Series: Post-"Amor Fati" [5]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: (Uploaded by Punk), Episode Related, Gen, God Nodule, Mulder Hears Voices, Post Amor Fati, Public Transportation, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-11-20
Updated: 1999-11-20
Packaged: 2017-11-29 23:51:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/692961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sab/pseuds/Sab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Knowledge is infinite, and absolute knowledge corrupts absolutely; something like that. (Uploaded by Punk, from The Sabrary.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wood & Nails

**Author's Note:**

> Again with the biblical themes. Please avoid if squeamish to such. This piece certainly fits in the series of my 6E/AF post-eps, but is in no way dependent on them. 
> 
> Per Neophyte challenge wherein Mulder's still got the latent sixth sense, Mulder goes to figure some stuff out. I adapted a little, from the challenge; I hope that's okay...
> 
> For Aurora Vere, Beta Reader Extraordinaire, as always.
> 
> Also for Kelly Keil, and for Exley, because they are solvers of problems and inspirers of good work and I owe them many, many thanks.
> 
> And for Mary Sebasky, who raised the bar for good fanfic and just keeps raising it, making me work even harder. Her insight into this piece, and her advice, are the reasons I can feel proud to post it.

"Running away, we'll do it. Why sit around resigned? Trouble is, son, the farther you run, the more you feel undefined For what you have left undone, and more, what you've left behind.

We disappoint, we leave a mess, we die but we don't. We disappoint in turn, I guess. Forget, though, we won't.

Like father, like son."

\-- Stephen Sondheim, from INTO THE WOODS

****

Dear Sirs: I am writing on behalf of the word 'incredible.' It has lost its meaning, and I would like to know which department I should address about getting it back.

Oh, for a suggestion box. I'd get them to give us two extra months of summer (one for baseball pre-season, one during); I'd get rid of all the one-way streets and I'd switch it so California's timezone is ahead of Washington's, and we can get the Academy Awards broadcast at a reasonable hour and finally get to care who the Angelenos and Franciscans want to vote for for president. I'd get them to make the stories make sense; I'd make truth straighter than fiction; I'd make life innovate art. I'd make 'be careful what you wish for' not just a good idea...it's the law. Lock me up: I'm breaking 'em all.

I'm stuck on the word 'incredible.' It used to mean 'not credible,' thoroughly without possibility, utterly beyond. It used to have a relationship with 'incredulous' and 'incredulity;' it was the epoch of belief, it was the best of times. Now, the poor dumb word's stuck in movie reviews and gets batted around elementary school playgrounds, 'dude, that's incredible! You go, girl!' and I want it back. I've got sentences for it, damn it; I've got stuff to say.

I wonder what the story is about. I wonder, all the time, how it's going to end.

What's happening to me, what happened to me, is incredible. This life, if you can call it that, that I'm stuck with, is incredible. I am incredulous; I am stalled with incredulity. Sometimes, on my good days, I've even got street cred, yo.

How's it going to end?

Scully said she didn't want me to drive, which really meant she didn't want me to _go_ , but here I am, taking the Metro.

She thinks we're finished, that we can put this behind us, she wants to, and for her I'm pretending to, but there's a big hole in this damned puzzle I've got to fill, gotta see if, when all the cardboard pieces are snapped in place, we're looking at wiemaraners in muumuus or kittens in trees or that damned white polar bear in a snowstorm. Only the corner pieces were easy.

I'm still jumpy; my head still hurts; I'm still fragmented and fragile from whatever this is I'm recovering from or losing – I can't tell which, right now, but I'll get back to you.

I haven't taken the subway in years. I forgot about the on-board poetry, hung above the seats, tucked on flat strips of posterboard locked behind greasy flaps of plexiglass in stainless steel cabinets so you can't steal 'em. I love that that's a threat, that transportation commissioners decided there was far too much poetry theft in this city, thank you very much, we're gonna lock it away behind that transparent plastic with the graffiti tags written in sharpie marker and the deep gouges from Swiss Army knives, done for no reason than because it's there. Because it's there: three little words that make men move mountains.

There are things I have to know; there are things men have to know, men in the world, men moving through their lives with five o'clock shadow and bad ties. I am men. Sitting down across from me, under a snippet from Pablo Neruda I can't read through the graffiti there's a man. His swollen face is shiny after a long day at work; he's squinting at the newspaper but he hasn't turned the page since I got on, he isn't reading, he's just staring, afraid of conversation, afraid of us, the world. I can see his socks poking up from his corporate shoes; his pudgy legs are crossed as well as they'll go, his pants stretched across their girth.

There's another man, silver-haired, standing, rocking, clutching the sweaty pole with a tanned fist; he's got a wedding band on. I prop my elbows on my knees; chin in hand I watch him watch the blank underground rocky walls speed by out dark windows. I imagine him like a Tylenol commercial, headache too bad to dance with his baby daughter. His wife opens his briefcase at night when he's asleep, and finds someone else's phone number. She never says a word.

We are fascinating, men, in all of our Iron John comraderie and tight smiles and white teeth. We have stories, all of us. There's narrative written, immutable illusory narrative; there is nothing new under the sun, and everything good's already been written in the Bible or Shakespeare. They haven't returned my calls and faxes, and life still imitates art.

There's a kid sitting on the last plastic seat in my row; he's too tall and his knees in vinyl pants poke out into the communal aisle; other men step around him carefully. He's got steal-me sneakers on, the kind you inflate, and he's wearing a tight little brown t-shirt, lighter than his skin, with the word "word" written across his pecs. He's got a tattoo wrapped up around his wiry bicep, makes me wish I remembered my Latin so I could read it. His jaw is clenching and relaxing, clenching and relaxing in time to the beat I can feel, rather than hear, pumping from his silver Sony discman. He will be a man, too soon. He'll realize he needs good credit to lease a car. He'll miss his mama's cooking; his girlfriend will break his heart.

We are our mothers' sons, men. We are the children of women, we are the generation of political correctness, of unisex cologne, of boxer-briefs. We are the target demographic; we are the voters; we drive imported cars and sing out, god bless America. Our mother's sons, we leave friendly phone messages and put the toilet seat down. Our mothers' sons, we play fair, we cooperate, we solve problems diplomatically. And we have nothing to lose, we children of women; it's our world; we own it. We are Paris, we are demi-gods flattering Aphrodite to win Helen of Troy, playing with the gods for oneupmanship down here, looking for our place among health clubs and juice bars, owning it all, owning up to it, owning everything.

But there are stumbling blocks, there are trips and tricks in this maze; it's not a free ride, and this is my stop.

Because we are our fathers' sons, too.

Which is why I'm here, at the door to the Department of Defense, with Diana Fowley's keycard. Scully gave it to me like she thought it was some sort of memento; she pressed it into my hand blinking up at me sadly, this saved you, Mulder, Diana saved you. And maybe it is, a memento, that is, but we, our fathers' sons, don't care about sentimentality. To me it's simply a key, maybe metaphorically a puzzle piece, maybe a wiemaraner or a polar bear or the translation of that kid's Latin motto. But I am my father's son, and I will wield this key the only way we men know how: like a weapon.

How's it going to end?

Scully doesn't know that the voices haven't stopped. From somewhere they're still out there, muttering under their breath, plotting, plodding, dizzying. Her voice is gone, Scully's. The one licking flame from that hell I'd have liked to keep and they took it away. That's how you make kids cry in TV commercials; I read that somewhere. You say, "hey, kid, check it out! PlayStation! Want to play Tekken 3 with me? I'll let you teach me all the secrets..." and the kids reach up with their clean hands and their starched shirts for the game controller, and you yank it away, mwah hah hah, you stare down like the devil and the director says "roll 'em!" and eight weeks later you turn on your TV and there's that kid, crying because he skinned his knee riding his bike, but it's okay, because mom has pain-free Wound-o-dine, and she'll make it aalllll better. Those are the kids who grow up to be men. It's amazing we can do anything, fucked up as we are.

And that's what they did to me, they gave me this gift, this cursed gift, this curse, and then they yanked away Scully and left the rest behind, further away now, quiet whispering voices taunting me for what I had and what I left behind.

It's cold in here, and clean. There are skid marks on the linoleum hallway floor and I can't imagine how they got there, burned rubber like tire tracks in the narrow corridor. It's Friday night, past rush hour, everyone's gone home to Boston Market chicken dinners and "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," and I've got the goddamned Lower Level Research Labs of the goddamned United States Department of Defense to myself.

I remember this; I remember all of this. I remember the skidmarks, I remember the doors with their square windows drawn across with embedded chicken wire. Something drew me back here; something made me say, "yes, Scully, I'm going to sleep, don't worry about me," and then get up and get on the Metro and come down here with Diana's keycard to see if I can get the voices back.

I can get the voices back. If there's one good thing I've got as my mother's son, it's intuition, women's intuition; I wear it like women wear men's Calvin Klein. And if there's one thing I've got from my father it's the drive for completion, it's the need to know, and I need to know.

I don't know who my father is.

I know who my father is.

But who is he? Whose son is he? Which child is he? Which man?

I stop outside the door where they'd kept me sprawled on my crucifix, and stare at the window, not through it, but at it. Window.

I'm about to turn the handle when I hear a click, a round click, and another. Clicks familiar as a heartbeat, as my heartbeat, accelerating, splashing, as familiar as the distant voices of a million mothers' sons.

Click.

Click.

Louder now as she turns the corner and approaches. Scully in shoes. Click. Click. Stop.

"You shouldn't be here, Mulder," she says, and I try to think of a similarly cliched bit of film dialogue to quip back at her, but can't. She's a safe distance away, a good pace and a half, and with the perspective of the narrow shrinking hallway she's looking me square in the eye.

"Of course I shouldn't," I say. My head is throbbing; the stitches itch and I remember the taste and smell of bactine and anaesthesia.

"Come on," she says, reaching out a hand. Click click and she's beside me.

I am a child of women; who is this woman? What is it in history, in the music of the spheres, in the songs of the ages that brings her here, click click beside me, at all the right moments? With the intuition that she is her father's daughter, she always knows.

"Come with me," I say. "I have to go in there. I have to see."

"I can tell you," she says. "It's ugly and clinical. I'll draw you a picture. Let me drive you home."

The voices are louder, cacophany, Pleistocene, ancient.

She touches my arm and my god-given brain sends signals to my flesh, feel it, remember. Sense.

"How did you get in here, anyway?" I ask. She doesn't answer, and I don't really care; there's something beyond us that brings her here at times like these. I nearly laugh when I picture the security guard at the main gate holding a handkerchief to his bleeding nose, fuckin' A, the bitch punched me!

Her hand drops from my arm. "What's here, Mulder? Just bad memories."

"Just answers, Scully," I say, more abruptly than I intend to. Generations of mothers and daughters stare back at me through the warm cool of her eyes. I take a breath, feel my chest swell. "When I was..." I look away. They're too much, the mothers and the daughters and the lost women and the spent and neglected and ever loving. I look at the chicken wire. "When I was here, when I was under, Spender – the smoking Spender – talked to me. Or, communicated with me, somehow. He told me he was my father."

He is my father.

Generations of women gasp, then cover for it. "He's lying, Mulder," she says. "He was just trying to throw you, to get your guard down. You know that. Come on. Don't do this to yourself."

Don't do this to me.

I shake my head, look at her/them. "He wasn't lying," I said. "It's the truth. I probably always knew. That's why he couldn't kill me."

Scully shot me a look, just Scully, Dana Scully, generations gone. "He tried to kill you a dozen times! He just never succeeded!"

"Then come in, with me," I say. "Whatever it is that's allowing me to hear these voices, whatever it is that's got me...tapped into some larger plane, it's focused here. I tracked it here. I took the subway, even!" I try to smile.

She tries to smile back. She's looking for something, in me; she's looking for a reason to stay, a reason to make it okay that she's doing this with me.

"Then I'll let you drive me home," I say.

I push the door open and the voices spill out, deafening, and we step inside.

There's vibrating through sinuses like monks, there's the thunder of a thousand thousand native voices singing out illegible, ululating, kaiaing, moaning, and through it I can hear him, slashing through it, through the beauty of the music with his steel-armored tank leaving skid marks on the linoleum, he's got it, he's stolen it from me, my gift, my gift for hearing and for finding, but he's found me with it, here, he brought me here, to talk, to tell me, to preach to his captive audience.

There is nothing but him.

(I see you brought her with you,) he says, from somewhere. (She's worried about you. She's jealous, too.)

(Why did you bring me back here?)

(You came,) he says. (You wanted to know the truth.)

(Tell me the truth,) I think at him.

(You are your father's son,) he says. (You’ve figured that out already. I'm very proud of you, Mulder. Fox. I always have been.)

(Tell me what else I'm missing,) I think, harder. My head throbs.

(Don't you want to know what Agent Scully's thinking? What she thinks about you? Isn't that what you miss the most?)

(I don't want to hear it from you.)

(Very well,) he communicates. (Then I'll tell you why you're here. Why you came. What this is about, for you.)

(Good.) If I were in a place where I could feel regret for being here, I might. But there's no room for that, in this void; there's no time: time isn't.

(Joseph was a carpenter and worked with wood and nails,) he says, reciting it like it's a children's poem. (He learned his son was not his own, and with wood and nails he built a crucifix to do away with his son, and spare himself the embarrassment of cuckoldism. And the embarrassment of his own inadequacy.)

Joseph. My father. (That's not true!) I think I'm crying; my eyes hurt; I want to fire my gun and shoot birds and plate glass and destroy something beautiful.

(Bill Mulder was inadequate, and knew it,) he continues. (He couldn't handle the embarrassment. That's why he wanted to give you away to the project.)

(But you wouldn't let him.)

(No.)

(So you took Samantha instead.)

(You are your father's son,) he says, like it's a compliment. (My son. You had such promise. You still do. We couldn't afford to lose you.)

(Fuck you!) I holler from behind my eyes. (I believe you're my father, but I am not your son! I will never be your son!)

(You have my resilience, Mulder. My stamina. My survival,) he says. (You are more like me than you'll ever admit. Why else do you think the late Agent Fowley was so drawn to both of us?)

I try and shut him out; I shake my head, violently, my stitches throb, I want to scream; I can't remember how I got here and I can't remember how to get out.

(I'll let you go in a moment,) he says. (But I want you never to forget that it was I who saved you. I spared your life countless times. We're twinned, you and I. Bill Mulder was inadequate, and he died for it. You are blessed, like me, with a different fate. And every day you walk through the world with your beautiful partner at your side, I want you to remember that you have me to thank for it. I can't hurt you, Fox. You are your father's son.)

He's gone. He's gone. The room is spinning, whirling, nauseatingly bright even in darkness and I can't remember where I am or how I got here or how long I've been gone or what I'm late for or what I've missed. What I've missed.

Cool hand to my forehead, slender fingers against the back of my neck. "Mulder?"

She's silhouetted in this light, a perfect haloed cameo against the fluorescents and formica and stainless steel. I'm sitting on the floor, shocks of pain shooting up my spine.

I take her hand and she pulls me to my feet.

"Where did you go?" she asks, gently.

"I don't know," I say.

"Did you learn what you wanted to learn?"

"I don't know," I say again. She believes me. She believes. Now.

She's got her hand against the small of my back and she steers me out of the room, into the corridor with skid marks where the voices are fading, they're disappearing, they're gone.

Everything is gone. Knowledge is infinite, and absolute knowledge corrupts absolutely; something like that. There's nothing in this world that makes sense for me anymore, or maybe it makes too much sense, this myth repeated, this historical promise of martyrdom that can only end in a pool of blood, hung alone from wood and nails. Wood and nails.

Scully's not talking; she knows I don't have words for it, but her hand is warm against my back and I intuit her motions, follow her in step. Always.

We push through the door and I look down at her, so strong, so human. She doesn't fit into the myth; she is her own myth, her own tragic story. But where our stories meet is no man's land, and no woman's. In there we are sons of no one, and daughters to no one. We are partners, she and I, each other's, and each other's alone. She's my loophole, my way out.

It's dark now, outside, and cold. She's parked on the street, and she lets me in the passenger's side before circling the car, getting in and starting up.

I watch her move two tons of steel machinery with tiny feet and I am overcome. Save me, Scully, I want to say, but the words don't come. Get me out of here, change the ending, erase, delete, back up, drop this character into another story where I'm not doomed to wood and nails.

She flicks on her turn signal and glances at me before rounding the corner onto the on ramp.

She hears me.

She understands.

Beat.

This is how it ends. This is my way out.

We merge into traffic and I settle back into the seat, watching the imported cars go by, children of women speeding home, sons of men returning to their daughters.

There is nothing but us, Scully and I. We are not preordained, we are not predestined, and even so, in this enormous world of men we found each other, a colossal global coincidence causing earthquakes in Turkey and Mexico. We shook it up, she and I. We shake it up. And when the dust settles it's just her, and me, in the car, shifting lanes and she reaches down to turn the radio on, quietly, just enough to distract me, just enough to warm us up. Streetlights outside, and night. Cars and children. Wood and nails.

And now, and forever, in this silence, me and Scully.

She will willingly save me again. And again. She is my story.


End file.
